Wednesday, 7 January 2015

Restore Exchange 2013 Database from Windows Backup

In this blog we’ll have a look at how to perform restoring process of Exchange Database using Windows Server Backup. This issue generally encountered that though having a backup, but we are unable to fetch data from that. So, in this blog we would be exploring on all the basic steps of restoring database.

So let’s take an example where we restore mailboxes of Exchange 2013 using Windows backup.Eg: This mailbox user has received items up to 10:05.

and the last backup for the server was taken at 10:00 am (as shown in fig.)

So it is seen from the last backup that there are items in the mailbox. They (items) might be at risk if there is any failure. So let’s create some failure which causes database to be lost. To resemble this lets dismounted DB01 database & then deletes the EDB file database.

This shows that the Database has been lost & it can be restored from the last backup. Let's start the restoring process...

As in this example, backup is stored in this server only. So on clicking on recover it may ask for where is the backup stored, and then you can select “This Server (E15MB1)” as shown below.

Then it asks for choosing the date and time for the backup.

The dates shownis the date when the backup
is taken. Then you have to select recovery type (Files and Folders).

[ NOTE: If you select the application option a question may arise here: Is DB02 is at risk when we restore database from windows backup?Actually application recovery process can’t restore single database at a time. DB02 is online when DB01 is being recovered & then DB02 is offline. It (mails of DB01 & DB02) can be accessed but after the recovery process is done.]

In the figure below, either you can select the complete data to restore or can select “Mailbox” (it’ll restore the whole mailbox database).

NOTE: Make ensure that the destination you’re mentioning for restoring backup must have enough storage.Then you have to select alternate location as the original location is online database (as in fig.)

After mentioning the location, it’ll ask for confirmation. Finally click the Recover option to restore & it will take you to the Recovery Process.

Wait till the restore process will complete.

The figure above shows the Restored Data files & log files. After restoring process has completed, both DB01 and DB02 can access their mails even that one also which were received or sent after the backup taken. This actually happened because the recovery process has the transaction log file that remains intact on the server for updating database.From the above steps we have restored the data successfully even though Windows Backup is not that much flexible application for this purpose but still we had did this. So this is the simple procedure we have seen how to recover Exchange mailbox from backup. But what happened when your database is in unhealthy condition or if you don’t have created any backup & you’re unable to restore the database then I would recommend you to go through the Exchange Recovery Software which helps you in recovering data & restoring it as well.The best part of this application is it helps to recover corrupted EDB file from the Exchange server and restore database of Exchange server EDB file to Outlook PST or Active Exchange server EDB file format without any obstacle.